Monday, May 31, 2010

"I have been to Hell and back and let me tell you it was wonderful." - Louise Bourgeois

The artist Louise Bourgeois has died at 98 on Monday at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. It seemed that she would live forever. Her career has been historic. Holland Cotter has just written in the New York Times that "her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on younger artists, particularly women."

I have been inspired by Louise Bourgeois' work for quite some time, having encountered her sculptures for the first time when I was a High School student taking classes at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC. Her life ends but the mystery embodied in her artwork lives on.

A recent bio provides the details:

"Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 to a family of tapestry restorers. In 1938, Bourgeois married American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York City, where she currently lives and works. In a career extending over seven decades, Bourgeois has explored her memories and fears in a complex body of work ranging from poetic drawings to room size installations. She has stated that she gives her emotions and fears a physical form. In 1982, Bourgeois was the first woman artist to receive a Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She represented America at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and was given the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton in 1997. In 2007, the Tate Modern in London, in collaboration with Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, organized a Retrospective of her work that travelled to the Guggenheim, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hirshhorn in the United States."

Saturday, May 29, 2010

“The American art world often likes to put artists into boxes. You’re an artist, not a filmmaker. You’re a photographer, not a painter. But Dennis shows you can blur those boundaries, which is very current and exciting.”-Jeffrey Deitch

Dennis Hopper has died at 74 just weeks before an exhibit of his work will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Over the years Hopper has created paintings and photographs along with his films. His photographs are noteworthy because of his unique access to his portrait subjects such as Andy Warhol and because of his romantic, brooding aesthetic.

Dennis HopperDouble Standardsilver gelatin print 1961

Jori Finkel in the Los Angeles Times noted that " most big museum exhibitions take years to organize, but new director Jeffrey Deitch had the idea for this show just a couple of months ago when visiting Julian Schnabel, a longtime friend of Hopper."

“We’re rushing this exhibition because Dennis Hopper is ailing,” Deitch says, “and I wanted him to be able to participate in the selection of works. He saw the space with us last week.”

Friday, May 28, 2010

"L.A. is a city where people come to find themselves and explore new ways of thinking and being. They have a longing for an understanding of soul, and find themselves drawn to Jung."
-Nancy Furlotti, (co-president of the Philemon Foundation which financed the the translation of The Red Book)

At the Hammer Museum until June 6th is the exhibition The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology. On display for the first time on the west coast is psychologist Carl Jung’s (1875-1961) Red Book. Many scholars consider Jung's Red Book the most influential unpublished work in psychology. The Hammer Museum explains that "Jung also considered the Red Book to be his most important work, or as Jung described it, the "prima materia for a lifetime’s work."

Jung's massive illuminated volume has spent most of its existence in a Swiss safe deposit box. Only a select group has ever been allowed to view Jung's Red Book. Thanks to the Rubin Museum in New York, the Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, and the Jung family private archive, we now have the chance to view the Red Book.

The Hammer's show is intimately presented. Jung's Red Book is displayed open in a glass case in the middle of the exhibition space. Facsimile edition's of the Red Book printed by W.W. Norton & Company line one wall while Jung's thoughts, sketches and paintings encircle the room.

Jung sought to find a visual form for his dreams and fantasies and ended up using a mandala like structure in his graphic work. Similar in appearance to Tibetan Buddhist artworks, Jung's drawings and paintings evoke a world outside the flow of physical time. Instead we are given a fascinating glimpse into Jung's psyche. This once in a lifetime opportunity is not to be missed. And the lecture series (see below for an example) is noteworthy as well.

Last night the final episode of Lost was broadcast on ABC. After a six year run the series ends almost as it began with a close up of Jack's face. Six years ago, Jack opened an eye to the strange new world of the island. Last night his eye closed to the mystery.

Satisfyingly, the mystery remains for us. The intersection of quantum physics and myth that seemed to engender the island remains tantalizingly out of reach. Jack's father may have walked offscreen into a heavenly light in the slide sideways/ slide metaphysical finale but on the island the tangible wreckage of a plane remains in the final shot before the credits roll.

At the start of this season, Chad W Post on the WSJ's Speakeasy wrote,"So if Lost wraps up with a definitive conclusion, with a series of resolutions and answers to all the mysteries, I’ll be disappointed. Great works of art don’t work that way. Great works of art are open to interpretation. If I already know the solution, why revisit the puzzle?"

Yesterday, in Paris the exhibition Turner and the Masters closed as well. I had the opportunity to visit the Grand Palais a few weeks ago and reveled in the light in Turner's works. In JMW Turner's paintings, light and shade are not abstract concepts nor a means to an end. Light and Shadow for Turner were in a sense palpable beings or characters.

As this season's episodes of Lost built to a conclusion, the dichotomy of light and shadow gained screen time. At times this duality was schematically rendered as black and white or as a glowing cavern and a shifting being of smoke. In a mythic sense were Jacob and the Man in Black merely personifications of day and night? Or was there a darker battle between Good and Evil that threatened all existence?

Turner would have had fun with the themes and imagery in Lost. I can only imagine how much richer and powerful Turner's depiction of the glowing cavern would have been. In the hands of a master like Turner a simple medium of pigment and oil can create a world that far surpasses the technological feats of digital graphics.

Turner learned much from the artists who preceded him. From Claude Lorrain, Aelbert Cuyp, Rembrandt and others Turner learned "to blend ... in all the golden colour of ambient vapour." It is the mystery within this blending of light and shadow that draws us back into Turner's paintings over and over again.

Chad W. Post hoped that "the final moments of Lost echo the ambiguously abrupt ending of The Crying of Lot 49, which leaves the reader tantalizingly close to resolution but forces them to go back through the book time and again, revisiting key brilliant passages in hopes of figuring it all out. I want my Lost incomplete. I want it to leave me with a desire to keep re-watching and debating. I want it to remain the great work of art it has become over the past five seasons."

Some Other Thoughts on the Lost Finale:

Chad W. Post writes "In terms of the overall narrative arc, I thought this was pretty brilliant and satisfying. The show has always been more about the characters than the mysteries. And the more time that passes (hello 1:30am!), the happier I am with how Lost resolved itself."

Tyler Cowen writes on Marginal Revolution,"Overall I thought it was the best final episode of a series I have seen, with close competition from The Sopranos."

James Poniewozik at TIME Magazine writes: "Lost, was not perfect, because nothing is. I still believe that Jacob and the Man in Black were never characterized as richly as other characters, like Ben, which rendered Locke in the end too much of a generic baddie. And the final images--with the heavenly light shining though the doorway of the chapel, as Christian walked into it a la Close Encounters--were a bit overly touched by an angel. But the finale, as good TV finales do, captured what the show's essence. Lost is a story about community, connections and interdependence. You live together, it told us, or you die alone. And when you live together--when you share of yourself and make meaning with others--you never die alone, even when you die bleeding out on the floor of a bamboo forest."

Sir John Gilbert wrote after watching Turner paint on Varnishing Day:

"He had been the Royal Academy all the morning, and seemed likely, judging by the state of the picture, to remain for the rest of the day. He was absorbed in his work, did not look about him, but kept on scumbling a lot of white into his picture -nearly all over it. The subject was a Claude-like composition, a bay or harbour-classic buildings on the banks of either side and in the centre the sun. The picture was a mass of red and. yellow in all varieties. Every object was in this fiery state. He had a large palette, nothing on it but a huge lump of flake white; he had two or three biggish hog tools to work with, and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows, and every part of the surface. . . . The picture gradually became wonderfully effective, just the effect of brilliant sunshine absorbing everything and throwing a misty haze over every object. Standing sideway of the canvas, I saw that the sun was a lump of white standing out like the boss of a shield."

“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915” is currently on view at LACMA and unfortunately closes today. The exhibition includes more than eighty paintings which range in date from the Revolutionary War era to just before World War I. The stories are myriad and the paintings are narrative heavy and engaging.The museum is open till 7 pm and if you haven't seen the exhibition already, rush on down today.

Barbara Weinberg curated the exhibition “American Stories" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The website that the Metropolitan Museum put together for the exhibit is rich in detail and I enjoyed the audio elements with Barbara Weinberg and guests. The podcast with painter Eric Fischl discusses John Singer Sargent's "An Interior in Venice" and "A Street in Venice". Eric Fischl admits right out that he has not studied the history of the works in depth and so allows himself the imaginative freedom to wander into the paintings and describe what he finds in the artworks themselves.

Sargent is a painter's painter so I am not surprised that Eric Fischl would provide fresh insights into Sargent's work.

Eric Fischl describes Sargent's technique:
"Sargent is someone who has such extraordinary bravura, the kind of slapdash quality of the paint combined with his acute observations. It’s incredibly reductive in that he can see so accurately the essentials for what describes an ornate, gold Venetian table or what it takes to capture the quality of the material of the dress or something like that. I mean, it’s so luscious, so direct, and so perfectly observed. At the same time, it’s so fast and facile. It’s pretty amazing."

John Singer Sargent's "A Street Scene in Venice" seems to depict a chance meeting between the viewer wandering through the maze of Venetian alleys and a man and woman engaged in conversation outside a wine shop. The woman seems to stop mid sentence to gaze at us as we arrive on the scene. Eric Fischl sees the man as caught up in a flirtation or rendezvous:

"The other thing that strikes me in this painting is the way he’s painted her dress, which looks like a bonfire. If this painting’s about sex, about desire, about lust, whatever, then, you know, she’s absolutely the object of that desire and she’s on fire. And fire is something that is also being consumed by the huge, vast emptiness of that blackness that it reaches up into .... I think it’s more like the feeling of you’re moving through your life and you come on this scene. You interrupt something. You have the chance to pass by it, but for that brief moment it stops you and you take it in and then you go past, you know, you go into the light."

Thursday, May 13, 2010

I recently returned from a trip to Paris, Amsterdam and Maastricht. Art, ideas and images from each of these cities hover in my mind. The works of Lucian Freud, on exhibit at the Pompidou Center in Paris until the 19th of July 2010, are in the forefront as I just completed a painting for the Julie Nester Gallery's Self Portrait Exhibition which opens on June 12, 2010.

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Phil Cousineau, Eric Lawton and Doors Drummer John Densmore at BookSoup in Hollywood on May 5, 2010

Phil Cousineau read from his new book WordCatcher at BookSoup in Hollywood last night. Tonight, May 6, 2010, Phil will stop by my studio at the Santa Monica Airport where we will be hosting a gathering to celebrate the publication of Wordcatcher and to feature other collaborative projects that Phil Cousineau and I have worked on. The evening will start at 7 pm.

Santa Monica-based artist Gregg Chadwick has been painting for three decades. His current studio is an old airplane hangar where the flurry of takeoffs and landings on the runway outside seems to creep into Chadwick’s paintings as he explores movement and travel within his light-filled paintings. His current series of paintings is entitled ‘Mystery Train’ and evokes the railways of America that Chadwick says run in his blood. His grandfather worked as a fireman, stoking coal in steam engines before advancing to train engineer on the Jersey Central Line. Chadwick often says that family gatherings brought the rhythms of the rails home. The sounds of railroad workers echoed in the music that Chadwick’s relatives played in the shadows of the train lines outside. For Chadwick and many others such as writer Greil Marcus, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and musicians Junior Parker and Elvis Presley, the enduring mythos of America and its legacy is wrapped in the blues notes of the song ‘Mystery Train’

Chadwick's thoughts on the intersection of art, culture, and politics can be found on his blog, Speed of Life.

Chadwick's flickr page which is often updated with new finished paintings and work in progress is at: